1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an ink jet recording apparatus in which wet ink drops landing on closely located dot positions are prevented from bleeding to mix together, and a method of controlling the operation of an ink Jet recording apparatus.
2. Description of Related Art
A conventional ink jet recording apparatus for color printing has a printhead mounted on a carriage and the printhead is equipped with a plurality of ink nozzles through which ink drops of various colors are ejected. Each of the ink nozzles ejects ink drops of a corresponding color in accordance with print data which is received from a host apparatus such as a personal computer. Ink involved in this type of recording apparatus includes black ink, yellow ink, magenta ink, and cyan ink.
Ink drops of black and other colors are ejected in random order, so that black ink drops and adjacent ink drops of other colors may land on the print medium at almost the same time. The ink drops of different colors are still wet and may bleed after landing at predetermined positions, reaching adjacent drops. This results in poor print quality.
Some of apparatuses of this type employ a bi-direction printing method where when the carriage is moved to reciprocally scan the recording medium such as recording paper, printing operation is performed not only when the carriage moves in the forward direction but also when the carriage moves in the reverse direction. Therefore, the printhead may stop at different positions and run at different speeds, causing ink drops to land on positions slightly deviated from where they are aimed to land. Thus, the bi-direction printing method presents more chances of unwanted mixing of black ink and other colored ink, which is detrimental to high quality color printing.